February 7: Bitcoin, Web 3, Flying Taxi, AI

BITCOIN IS DOWN REALLY, REALLY BAD SURELY NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. Bitcoin continues to tumble down, down, down. ....... Bitcoin’s latest crash is still far from its lows last summer, when it plummeted to around $30,000 from a high of $60,000 (it’s currently hovering around $38,000).

THE “DOOMSDAY GLACIER” IS IRREVERSIBLY MELTING, RESEARCHERS SAY "IT COULD FALL APART QUICKLY, IN DECADES." the West Antarctica ice shelf could melt in as quickly as a few decades, unleashing the inland ice it holds back into the ocean and raising sea levels by several catastrophic feet. ...... Just as the Thwaites may unleash inland ice into the ocean — much like a cork pulled from a bottle — others are dumping concerning amounts of fresh water near penguin populations. ...... iceberg A-68a was the world’s largest before it shattered into nearly a dozen mini-bergs. ........ The busted-up A-68a flushed about 162 billion tons of fresh water into the ocean near the penguin habitat, which could effect temperature, environment and marine life in unexpected and deadly ways. ........

Save the penguins, and save ourselves.

Hydrogen and lower emissions can push China to carbon neutrality, report says Royal Dutch Shell report suggests focusing on hydrogen, biofuels and carbon-removal technologies ...... China’s 2060 target is challenging but creates opportunities to be a global leader in low-carbon manufacturing, Shell International’s chief economist says ........ In Britain this winter, production of green hydrogen was already cheaper than that of grey hydrogen (produced from fossil fuels), because of a spike in natural gas prices in Europe.

Big Tech beware: Asian creators are rewriting the future with Web 3.0 The proliferation of blockchain and NFTs is decentralising the web, allowing creators to monetise their connections without depending on Big Tech social media platforms What gives Asian creators the edge over their Western counterparts is not just their numbers – it’s also the readiness of Asian audiences to embrace Web 3.0’s new, immersive experiences .......... More than 50 million people globally consider themselves creators ...... this ecosystem is transforming rapidly with the arrival of “Web 3.0”. ......... If Web 1.0 was the beginning, where we consumed content passively on the internet, and Web 2.0 gave us the power to create that content and share it, then Web 3.0 is the decentralised web – flipping the platform-centric model on its head,

ripping power from Big Tech and handing it to the creators themselves

. ........... Internet penetration may have reached critical mass later than in the West but Asia’s digital landscape has grown quickly into a vibrant, engaged and innovative space. ........ Asian tech platforms and users are adept at developing apps that serve local audiences’ needs better than Silicon Valley equivalents, from WeChat and Line’s evolution into payments and e-commerce to Grab’s pioneering service fulfilment. .........

The meteoric rise of Beijing-based TikTok owner ByteDance also shows how Asian-led innovations are rivalling the dominance of companies such as Meta, YouTube, Twitter and Netflix.

.......... Monetisation models devised by Google and Facebook for creators in North America and Europe have not always delivered the same returns for creators with Asian audiences. ........ Asian creators have the impetus needed to design and nurture communities away from the dependence on mainstream Web 2 platforms. .......... Leveraging the best of blockchain-based technology, creators can launch their own non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that unlock fan experiences, develop a range of digital collectibles and mint social tokens that develop connections with fans, without platforms taking a cut. ......... K-pop superstar band BTS is jumping on the success of this approach, transitioning from physical to virtual experiences through planned NFTs that offer exclusive access to music and band content. ............ Idols could rise above the monopoly of record labels and artist management companies. Users could directly vote for and fund talent they want to support. ......... Idols could rise above the monopoly of record labels and artist management companies. Users could directly vote for and fund talent they want to support.

The Metaverse Is Money and Crypto Is King—Why You’ll Be on a Blockchain When You’re Virtual-World Hopping . In the beginning, Web 1.0 was the information superhighway of connected computers and servers that you could search, explore and inhabit, usually through a centralized company’s platform—for example, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Around the turn of the millennium, Web 2.0 came to be characterized by social networking sites, blogging, and the monetization of user data for advertising by the centralized gatekeepers to “free” social media platforms, including Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, and TikTok. ......... Web 3.0 will be the foundation for the metaverse. It will consist of blockchain-enabled decentralized applications that support an economy of user-owned crypto assets and data. ....... Blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions, typically in a decentralized and public database called a ledger. ....... This decentralized recording system is very difficult to fool or control. Public blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, are also transparent—all transactions are available for anyone on the internet to see, in contrast to traditional banking books. ........ the blockchain allows you to own digital goods in a virtual world. ....... Different groups will build different virtual worlds, and in the future these worlds will be interoperable—forming the metaverse. ........ The decentralized nature of blockchain will potentially reduce the need for gatekeepers in financial transactions, but companies will still have many opportunities to generate revenue, possibly even more than in current economies. Companies like Meta will provide large platforms where people will work, play, and congregate. ...... a seemingly ubiquitous virtual future that is coming soon to a ‘verse near you. .

Habitat for Humanity Is Using 3D Printing to Build Affordable Houses . Over the last year home prices have skyrocketed (along with prices of almost everything else), leaving millions of people unable to afford to move or to change their housing situation. ........

the US has a housing supply shortage of 3.8 million homes

.......... construction has slowed due to labor shortages, high raw material costs, and supply chain issues ......... Alquist uses a Raspberry Pi-based monitoring system in its home to track environmental data and enable smart building applications, like maximizing energy efficiency or monitoring security. .

After First Pig-to-Human Heart Transplant, Scientists Aim to Make It Routine . The surgery brings xenotransplantation—transplanting organs between species—from a wild science fiction dream to reality. It’s a milestone that paves the road for more people to receive animal organs, making up for donor organ shortages ....... In 2021, we got a first answer. A kidney grown in a heavily genetically edited pig was transplanted into two people who were legally dead without brain function. The kidneys functioned normally for more than 50 days while the recipients were on life support. ...... Once removed, the heart is bathed in a bubbling, circulating bath chock-full of hormones, nutrients, and cocaine ....... a pig’s resting heart rate is roughly 90 beats per minute, which is on the high range of a healthy human heart. ......... pigs are surprisingly intelligent creatures that, unlike human organ donors, have no say in the process .

A UK Startup Is Building 200 Flying Taxi Hubs Around the World . a British startup called Urban-Air Port, which has plans to build 200 hubs for flying taxis in 65 different cities over the next 5 years. ........ a near future where air taxis glide across city skies in much the same way rideshare vehicles zoom around city streets. ......... an Urban-Air Port is 60 percent smaller than a traditional heliport, can be installed in days, can be easily relocated if needed, and is net-zero on carbon emissions........ global urban air mobility market will reach a value of $12.4 billion by 2027, almost double its 2020 value of $6.4 billion .

Meta Is Making a Monster AI Supercomputer for the Metaverse . Meta is building a new supercomputer to train enormous machine learning algorithms. ........... the AI Research Supercluster (RSC) already ranks among the most powerful machines on the planet. When it’s finished, the company formerly known as Facebook says it will be the fastest AI supercomputer anywhere. ...... Meta hopes RSC can improve their products by training algorithms that better surface harmful content. Further out, the company says advances might enable

real-time language translation between tens of thousands of people online

and multitasking algorithms that can learn from and generalize across different inputs, including text, images, and video. ......... tech’s biggest players—from Meta to Alphabet and Microsoft—deem it increasingly crucial to be competitive in cutting-edge AI. ........ a trend towards ever-bigger machine learning algorithms requiring greater computing resources and bigger data sets. ......... Google and Chinese researchers each built algorithms with over a trillion parameters. ...... the installation will grow to include 16,000 GPUs and an exabyte of storage—equivalent to 36,000 years of high-quality video ......... Once complete, Meta says RSC will serve training data at 16 terabytes per second and operate at a top speed of 5 exaflops. ........ the industry uses a benchmark called floating-point operations per second—or more colloquially, flops—which measures the number of simple equations a supercomputer solves each second .......

Large language models, in particular, also tend to pick up all manner of unsavory habits and biases during training.

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January 7: California, Plant Meat

Next Week You’ll Be Able to Eat ‘Chicken’ Made From Plants at KFC
H2 Clipper Will Resurrect Hydrogen Airships to Haul Green Fuel Across the Planet
These 2021 Biotech Breakthroughs Will Shape the Future of Health and Medicine
A Chinese Company Says It Will Be Selling Driverless Cars by 2024
The Capitol Police and the Scars of Jan. 6 For many officers, their bodies, minds and lives will never be the same after the attack.
The Boy King of YouTube Ten-year-old Ryan Kaji and his family have turned videos of him playing with toys into a multimillion-dollar empire. Why do so many other kids want to watch?
This Isn’t the California I Married The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?
An Evangelical Climate Scientist Wonders What Went Wrong

December 30: Dark Matter, Diamandis, Omicron

Dark matter and dark energy: the mysterious ingredients in our universe Science is an ongoing flirtation with the unknown. ...... The history of modern cosmology is one of the great triumphs of the human imagination. ........ most religions have also wondered about our origins ........ (1) Galaxies are receding from one another with speeds proportional to their distance, carried by the expansion of space itself; (2) A bath of microwave photons (i.e., the particles that make up light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation) permeates the whole universe, serving as fossils from the time when the first hydrogen atoms formed, some 400,000 years after the Big Bang — as predicted by theory; and (3) Between a second and three minutes after the Big Bang, the first light atomic nuclei were formed by a process called “primordial nucleosynthesis” in quantities also predicted by theory and verified by observations. ......... If we think of the material composition of the universe as a cake recipe, we find ourselves currently in the odd situation of knowing that we have three main ingredients — regular matter, dark matter, and dark energy — and how much of each we need, but we don’t really know what the two most abundant are. ......... Having mass (and thus gravitational pull), it affects the stuff we can see. But efforts to collect particles of dark matter have been unsuccessful so far, a somewhat stressful tension between astronomical observations and fundamental theory. .........

Dark energy was discovered in 1998 and is even more mysterious and elusive.

........ Like subtle tracks of a fox on a vast snowfield, we know they are out there in some form due to the way they impress their presence on what we can see in the world.

HOW TO CREATE A WORLD OF POSSIBILITY Before the invention of the wheel… the cart, the carriage, the automobile, the wheelbarrow, the roller skate, and a million other offshoots of circularity were not imaginable. They existed in a realm that was off-limits until the wheel was discovered. But once discovered, these pathways became clear. This is the adjacent possible. ............. We have wandered into a world where the expansive nature of technology has begun to connect with our inner desires. ........ “For most of history, the unique mix of talents, skills, insights, and experiences of each person had no outlet. If your dad was a baker, you were a baker. As technology expands the possibility space, it expands the chance that someone can find an outlet for their personal traits . . . When we enlarge the variety and reach of technology, we increase options, not just for ourselves and not for others living, but for all generations to come.” .......... one’s emotional satisfaction moves in lockstep with one’s income—as income rises, well-being rises—but only to a point. Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness. ............

Above that number, the correlation disappears.

.......... 70% to 80% percent of the money we earn goes to meet basic needs such as water, food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education. ........... On average, across the globe, the point where well-being and money diverge is roughly $10,000. ......... Thirty years ago, most well-off US citizens owned a camera, a CD player, a stereo, a video game console, a cell phone, a watch, and a whole bunch of other assets that easily add up to more than $10,000. All these now come standard on today’s smartphones. ............

In our exponentially enabled work, that’s how quickly $10,000 worth of expenses can vanish. And importantly, they can vanish without much outside intervention. No one set out to zero the costs of two dozen products.

.............. Unlike earlier eras, we don’t have to wait for corporations to get interested in solutions, or for governments to get around to our problems. We can take matters into our own hands. ......... Meanwhile, the one-quarter of humanity that has forever been on the sidelines—the rising billion—has finally gotten into the game. ............

where there is vision, the people flourish.

‘भारतमा ‘आउट ब्रेक’ हुने स्थितिमा पुगिसक्यो, नेपालमा संकट आउन सक्छ’ संक्रामक रोग विशेषज्ञ डा. प्रभात अधिकारी भन्छन्, ‘भारतमा ओमिक्रोन ‘आउट ब्रेक’ हुने स्थितिमा पुगिसकेको छ । अबको एक महिना वा त्यसको हाराहारीमा नेपालमा पनि संकट आउन सक्छ ।’ ........... ओमिक्रोन भेरियन्ट अन्य भेरियन्टभन्दा एकदमै चाँडो फैलिने हुन्छ । डेल्टा भेरियन्टभन्दा दुई/तीन गुणा चाँडो फैलिन्छ । डेल्टा भेरियन्ट एक हप्तामा दोब्बर भएको थियो भने ओमिक्रोन दुईदेखि तीन दिनमा दोब्बर भइरहेको छ । संक्रमण वा खोप लगाएको मानिसमा इम्यूनिटी हुँदा हुँदै पनि यो भेरियन्टलाई रोक्न सकिँदैन । ........ शुरु–शुरुका लहर पनि अन्य देशमा फैलिसकेपछि नेपाल आएको थियो । डेल्टा भेरियन्ट भारतमा फैलिएको एक महिनापछि नेपालमा देखिएको थियो । सुरुमा केसहरू ५/१०/२०/५० गर्दै बिस्तारै बढ्दै जान्छ । तर, ओमिक्रोन भाइरस एकदमै चाँडो फैलिन्छ । यसका केसहरू हरेक दुई दिनमा दोब्बर हुँदै जान्छ । बेलायत, अमेरिकामा फैलिएपछि भारतमा ओमिक्रोनले प्रवेश पायो । ...... हरेक दुई दिनमा दोब्बर हुने हो भने एक महिनामा ठूलो हाहाकार हुन सक्छ । अबको दुई/तिन हप्तामा धेरै परिवर्तन हुन सक्छ । .......... डेल्टा, ओमिक्रोन र रुघाखोकीका भाइरसका लक्षण उस्तैउस्तै हुन्छ । लक्षणका आधारमा रुघाखोकी, इन्फून्लजा वा कोरोना भाइरसको डेल्टा वा ओमिक्रोन भनेर छुट्याउन सकिँदैन । ......... खोप लगाइसकेकालाई ६ महिनापछि अनिवार्य रूपमा बुस्टर डोज दिनुपर्छ । नेपालमा अहिले कोरोना खोप भण्डारणमा थुप्रिएर बसेको छ । यो अवस्थामा बुस्टर डोजलाई पनि प्राथमिकतामा राख्नुपर्छ । ........ फ्रन्टलाइनर, जेष्ठ नागरिक, दीर्घरोगी आदीलाई बुस्टर डोज दिन थालिहाल्नुपर्छ । .......... कुनै नयाँ भेरियन्ट देखा परेपछि सामान्यतः दुई महिना उच्च गतिमा फैलिइन्छ । त्यसपछि विस्तारै एक महिनामा हराएर जान्छ । तर, हरेक भेरियन्ट छिटपुट रूपमा तीन–चार महिना रहन्छ, पूरै हराउँछ भन्ने हुँदैन । ......... कोभिडका नयाँ–नयाँ भेरियन्ट आउनेवाला छ । त्यहीअनुसार नै हरेक वर्ष खोप लगाउनुपर्छ । नयाँ भेरियन्ट आउन रोक्न संसारभरका मानिसलाई खोप दिनुपर्छ । अहिले संसारमा यस्ता पनि देश छन्, जहाँका मानिसले पहिलो डोजसमेत लगाएका छैनन् । त्यही ठाउँमा कोरोना आउट ब्रेक भएको पाइन्छ । ..........

डेल्टाको आउट ब्रेक भारतमा भएको थियो । त्यहाँ सबैलाई खोप दिइएको थिएन । जनघनत्व बढी भएकाले त्यहाँ भाइरसको नयाँ म्युटेशन भयो । डेल्टा भेरियन्ट भारतबाट विश्वभर फैलियो ।

.......... ओमिक्रोनमा धेरैजसोमा सामान्य रुघाखोकी मात्र हुनेवाला छ । मानिसहरू यो रुघाखोकी मात्र हो भनेर परीक्षण गर्न मान्दैनन् । अनि थाहै नपाई अन्य मानिसमा संक्रमण सार्न सक्छन् । ........

ओमिक्रोनले पहिलेको भन्दा दुई/तीन गुणा ठूलो लहर ल्याउन सक्छ ।

....... अहिले त सरकार भित्रकै निकायबीच पनि समन्वय नभएको अवस्था छ । सरकारको एक निकायको तथ्यांक अर्को निकायको सँग मिल्दैन । तथ्यांक नै नमिलेपछि गतिलो रणनीति बन्दैन । त्यसैले, एकद्वार प्रणाली हुनुपर्छ । ..........

कोरोनाको दोस्रो लहरमा धेरैले परिवारका सदस्य र आफन्तहरू गुमायौं । त्यो घाउ अझै मुटुमा छ, तर त्यो कोरोना बिर्सिसक्यौं । मास्क लगाउन, दुरी कायम गर्न बिर्सिसक्यौं ।

............ सरकारले खोपमा एक डलर खर्च गरेको छ भने १६ डलर फिर्ता आउँछ । सरकारले मास्क, खोप, औषधि, क्वारेन्टाइनमा गरेको खर्च १६ गुणा भएर फिर्ता आउँछ । ........... राजनीतिक प्रतिवद्धता देखिएको छैन । ओमिक्रोन नियन्त्रणका लागि कुनै पार्टी बोलेका छैनन् । बरु, महादिवेशन/जुलस भइरहेका छन् । जबकि, ओमिक्रोन नआइसकेको मान्दा पनि डेल्टा त हामीबीच छँदैछ । डेल्टा नै फैलिने जोखिम रहेकै अवस्थामा ओमिक्रोन आउन लागेको छ ।

How the Extinction of Ice Age Mammals May Have Forced Us to Invent Civilization
The Biggest Brain Maps Ever Created Are Pushing the Frontiers of Neuroscience
Chasing Energy’s Holy Grail: Was 2021 Fusion Power’s Breakthrough Year?
These Robotic Factories Will Make Supermaterials in Space

December 20: Pi Phone, Metaverse, Omicron

USE SUBGOALS TO ACHIEVE YOUR MOONSHOT
Oxford Invited an AI to Debate Its Own Ethics—What It Said Was Startling
This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through December 18)
This 'Breakthrough' in Chipmaking Could Bring Us A Phone With One-Week Battery Life Transistor stacking is getting Samsung, Intel, and IBM excited about the future of computing.
NFTs market hits $22bn as craze turns digital images into assets
Critics of non-fungible tokens say they are symptomatic of unsustainable digital gold rush
Scientists spot water ice under the 'Grand Canyon' of Mars "We found a central part of Valles Marineris to be packed full of water — far more water than we expected."
DRONE STARTUP TO FLY PALLETS WITHOUT PILOTS Dronamics will test a radical new vision of long-range cargo transport in Europe

The Metaverse Will Need 1,000x More Computing Power, Says Intel chipmaking giant Intel, the metaverse is on its way—but it’s going to take a lot more technology than we currently have to make it a reality, and the company plans to be at the forefront of the effort. .........

And what does “a persistent 3D virtual world” even mean?

....... Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash, published in 1992, was where the term “metaverse” first appeared; there, it described a 3D virtual world people could visit as avatars; they accessed this virtual world with virtual reality headsets that connected to a “worldwide fiber-optics network.” Another well-known reference is the 2011 book or 2018 movie Ready Player One. .......... the simplest way to describe the metaverse is as a connected network of 3D virtual worlds that is always “on” and happening alongside our real-world lives. ...... we can think of the metaverse as a “quasi-successor state to the mobile internet,” which will build on and transform the internet as we currently experience it. .........

“an even more immersive and embodied internet.”

....... powering the metaverse will require a 1,000-fold improvement on the computational infrastructure we have today ......... “You need to access to petaflops [one thousand teraflops] of computing in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds for real-time uses” ....... “Your PCs, your phones, your edge networks, your cell stations that have some compute, and your cloud computing need to be kind of working in conjunction like an orchestra.” .......... “We believe that the dream of providing a petaflop of compute power and a petabyte of data within a millisecond of every human on the planet is within our reach”

Omicron Is a Dress Rehearsal for the Next Pandemic America’s response to the variant highlights both how much progress we have made over the past two years — and how much work remains. ........ Omicron is one more sign that the current pandemic, which has now claimed the lives of nearly 800,000 Americans, is not over. ...........

“We know that there are pathogens worse than SARS-CoV-2 that are emerging and re-emerging and waiting for their moment to take off”

.............. “We have this Balkanized health care system, and the system is a giant mess” ....... Just as a more equitable distribution of vaccines might help squelch the next variant of concern, preventing the next big global outbreak will require ensuring that every country has the resources to detect and respond to emerging pathogens. ........

The United States is a large and fractured country — politically polarized and burdened with glaring inequities, rampant misinformation and disinformation, and a considerable distrust of public officials.

These are enormous, thorny problems and are much harder to address than ensuring that labs have the capacity to detect Omicron or any new pathogen. ........ “I’m confident in our ability to detect the variant,” Dr. Fauver said. “What I’m not confident in is our ability to do anything about it. We’re detecting the Delta variant every single day, every time we sequence.” .......

Scientists are finding more Omicron cases every day, and the variant could soon overtake Delta.

December 17: Robots, Crypto

Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator

Why It’s Still a Scientific Mystery How Some Live Past 100—and How to Crack It



US NAVY USES LASER WEAPON TO DESTROY “FLOATING TARGET” THE GOAL IS TO FEND OFF "BOMB-LADEN DRONE BOATS."
NASA BRAGS THAT ITS PROBE OFFICIALLY TOUCHED THE SUN THE PROBE'S DATA GIVES NASA INSIGHT INTO PREVIOUSLY UNOBSERVABLE PHENOMENA.
Princeton Researchers Create Terrifying VR Simulation of Nuke Attack to Train US Officials "You walk into that simulation and come out a changed person."
FURIOUS AT THE CONCEPT OF PAYING TAXES, ELON MUSK LASHES OUT AT ELIZABETH WARREN "PLEASE DON’T CALL THE MANAGER ON ME, SENATOR KAREN."
Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator
Why It’s Still a Scientific Mystery How Some Live Past 100—and How to Crack It
Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty and the Ways to End it.